"Read Only" external hard drive?

my seagate expansion external hard drive is all of a sudden "read only". it will not let me edit any files using my macbook pro. How do you change this? I have veiwed and edited files from this external drive using my mac before and not had any problems. but it will not work this time....

Connect the HDD to the MBP and click on it COMMAND+I and see what it says by FORMAT.
Have you tried this HDD with another Mac?
Ciao.

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Liz,
Sorry for not responding sooner, I support your position completely - as for the external drive I assumed that the individual was a previous mac user and knew about that (my mistake) at home I have a couple of external drives
one drive is acknowledged regardless of format (mac/win) its a partitioned drive.... the other one - far as the mac is concerned does exist when i connect it. I believe its a win only drive (will have to check the specs on it) but it works on the win-notebooks.
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Dear Apple Support Community,
Yesterday I bought a new MacBook Pro with OS X Mavericks.
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@banakaffalata thank you for sharing your experience, I am really sorry for your data loss... :/
I have two more hard drive but I'll run a backup before connecting them to the laptop with Mavericks.
Fortunately I haven't lost anything so far, and I also managed to understand better how things work.
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"Read Only" external hard drive?

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